The Age Wave

Share via

Two secrets to living to 100, according to a senior Beijing gerontologist, are “a positive mental state and a lower than normal intake of calories”.

If it was that easy, we’d all be doing it, and we are not. After six decades of steady overall improvement in diet, incomes and public health throughout the industrialised world, centenarians remain rare. Even in America, where they are most abundant, they account for barely two ten thousandths of the population.

Supercentenarians (who reach the 110 mark) are even rarer, and within that elite of the very old, there is, inevitably, an even more